Prioritizing quotas
When a quotas are defined for multiple response categorical questions, the quotas for all responses chosen by the respondent are pended. If the interview is completed, then the corresponding complete counts are incremented. When a respondent chooses more than one response, this results in more than one quota cell being incremented.
Quota prioritization lets you decide how many cells to pend, and allows you to choose the method by which those cells are chosen, one of:
▪Priority Pending. Pend the cell with the highest priority, if this response is chosen. If this response is not chosen, try the cell with the next highest priority, and so on. Cells with no priority defined have the lowest priority of all.
▪Random Pending. Pend a cell at random from the cells for the responses that have been chosen. If an interview times out and is restarted after a cell has been pended, the same cell will be pended if the interview is restarted. If the questionnaire contains routing or other logic based on the value of the pended cell, this ensures that the interview behavior will be the same whether or not it times out.
▪LeastFull Pending based on the ratio of completes to targets. Pend the cell that is least full from the cells for the responses that have been chosen. If an interview is restarted after timing out, the LeastFull cell is recalculated using the latest quota information. This might mean that a different cell is pended in the restarted interview to the one that was pended when the interview was originally started. If the questionnaire has routing based on the pended cell, the path through the interview might change once the completed portion of the interview has been replayed.
▪LeastFull Pending based on the number of completes only. Pend the cell that has the fewest completed interviews for the responses that have been chosen. If an interview is restarted after timing out, the LeastFull cell is recalculated using the latest quota information. This might mean that a different cell is pended in the restarted interview to the one that was pended when the interview was originally started. If the questionnaire has routing based on the pended cell, the path through the interview might change once the completed portion of the interview has been replayed.
In Quotas, you can set the type of prioritization you want to use and, for priority pending, the relative importance of each cell. Once you have a set the prioritization type you it is not advisable to change it, although you can change the cell priorities for Priority pending if you want. For more information, see
Changing quota targets, behavior flags, and cell priorities.
To set priorities
1 Click the button for the quota you want to prioritize.
2 In the Edit box, choose Prioritization. The Prioritization dialog opens.
3 In Prioritization, choose the type of prioritization you want to set.
4 In Number of cells, type the number of cells you want to prioritize. (This option is not available for Normal prioritization.)
5 Click OK.
The quota status report appears.
6 If you chose Priority pending, the right-most box for each cell contains a number (zero if priority pending has not been set for this cell before). Type the relative priority of each cell. For example, type 1 for the cell with the highest priority, 2 for the cell with the next highest priority, and so on.
7 Click Update to update the quota database.
Any changes that you make are replicated in the quota tables in the database but not in the project’s .mqd file. If you later reactivate the project and you choose to update the quota tables with the information in the .mqd file, any changes that you made with Quotas are overwritten with the information from the .mqd file. The Quota engine’s refresh interval with the database is 60 seconds. This means that any changes take effect on the server only after 60 seconds.
See also